The international 2010 ESF website is: www.esf2010.org and a Turkish language site can be found at www.sosyalforum.org

The ESF process’ website is here, and it contains information about both previous European social fora, as well as the preparation of this year’s event.

Our book,

More information can be found here.

A series of launch events are being held in the San Francisco Bay Area over the next week.

Movements become apparent as “movements” at times of acceleration and expansion. In these heady moments they have fuzzy boundaries, no membership lists–everybody is too engaged in what’s coming next, in creating the new, looking to the horizon. But movements get blocked, they slow down, they cease to move, or continue to move without considering their actual effects. When this happens, they can stifle new developments, suppress the emergence of new forms of politics; or fail to see other possible directions. Many movements just stop functioning as movements. They become those strange political groups of yesteryear, arguing about history as worlds pass by. Sometimes all it takes to get moving again is a nudge in a new direction… We think now is a good time to ask the question: What is winning? Or: What would–or could–it mean to “win?”

Contributors include: Valery Alzaga and Rodrigo Nunes, Colectivo Situaciones, Stephen Duncombe, Gustavo Esteva, The Free Association, Euclides André Mance, Michal Osterweil, Kay Summer and Harry Halpin, Ben Trott, and Nick Dyer-Witheford.

Reviews

“Where is the movement today? Where is it going? Are we winning? The authors of the essays in this volume pose these and other momentous questions. There are no easy answers, but the discussion is always insightful and provocative as the writers bravely take on the challenge of charting the directions for the Left at a time of ecological crisis, economic collapse, and political disillusionment.” – Walden Bello, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South

“Turbulence presents an exciting brand of political theorising that is directed and inspired by current strategic questions for activism. This kind of innovative thinking, which emerges from the context of the movements, opens new paths for rebellion and the creation of real social alternatives.“ – Michael Hardt, co-author ofCommonwealth, Multitude and Empire.

“The history of the past half-century and particularly the last decade is as easily told as a series of victories as defeats, maybe best as both. Sometimes we won–and this is what makes the What Does It Mean to Win?anthology such a powerful vision of the possible and the seldom-seen present. The authors of this book connect some of the more remarkable events of the last decade–in Oaxaca, in the banlieus of Paris, in the crises of neoliberalism–into a constellation of possibilities and demands, demands on the world but also demands on the readers, to think afresh of what is possible and what it takes to get there. As one author begins, ‘The new movements embodied and posited deliberate reactions to the practical and theoretical failures of previous political approaches on the left.’ This is the book about what came after the failures, and what’s to come” – Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell.

Product Details

Author: Turbulence Collective
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-110-5
Published: April 2010
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 160
Dimensions: 9 by 6
Subjects: Politics, Philosophy, Activism

‘What Would it Mean to Win?’ is available in bookshops and online here: PM Press | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.de | Amazon.at | Amazon.fr | Amazon.co.jp | Borders| Barnes and Nobel | Books-A-Million |

All events are taking place under the title ‘Prospects for Winning in an Age of Crisis’ and mark the launch of the Turbulence book, ‘What Would it Mean to Win?’

At each event, panelists include: Turbulence editor and author Tadzio Mueller; Turbulence author Gifford Hartman; In and Out of Crisis and Spectre editor Sasha Lilley; and Wobblies and Zapatistas author Andrej Grubacic.

SUNDAY 14 MARCH

2.00pm at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, in the Café, SF County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

More info: http://sfbookfair.wordpress.com/

Map and Directions: http://sfbookfair.wordpress.com/directions-time-and-place/

MONDAY 15 MARCH

7.00pm at The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

More info: http://www.pmpress.org/content/calendar_event.php?eid=20100217105837804

Map and directions: http://www.thegreenarcade.com/pg/05map.html

TUESDAY 16 MARCH

7.30pm at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704

More info: http://www.pmpress.org/content/calendar_event.php?eid=20100217111327107

Directions: http://www.moesbooks.com/cgi-bin/moe/location.html?id=TJeHBg6u

IN ADDITION…

Turbulence editors Tadzio Mueller and Ben Trott will both be speaking at the eighth annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (CSA) at University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Here are the details of the panel:

Thursday March 18, 2010

ANTAGONISM AND THE PLURALITY OF SOCIAL STRUGGLES

(ASUC  Student Center, Stephens)

Chair: Stevphen Shukaitis

‘Defining the (Post)Operaist Approach: Naming its Four Primary Elements’ – Ben Trott, Freie Universitaet Berlin

‘Another capitalism is possible? The Green New Deal, postOperaismo and the Biocrisis’ — Tadzio Mueller, Independent researcher, Berlin

‘Reading and Refusing Cultures of Fear/Terror with Autonomist Feminism’ — Fiona Jeffries, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, City University of New York

‘Thinking in the Conjuncture: Between Hegemonic and PostHegemonic Strategies’ — Chris Hurl, Carleton University

The full CSA conference program is online here.

Registration required. For more information, click here.

The software should provide a much more user-friendly format for readers using small devices, like mobile phones, and dramatically increase load time while doing so.

We’ll be tweaking the settings on this over the next few weeks, but any feedback is appreciated.

If you don’t like the new set up, you should be able to manually switch back to the old standard desktop version of the website in one flick of a digital image of a switch.

Simply click on it and then on the Google Reader tab:

You’ll be taken to a page where you can post a link, with or without a comment, in Google Buzz.

We’ve also installed a one-click Google Buzz button in the News thread. You can use the tool simply by clicking on the red, blue, yellow and green speech bubble at the bottom of each News item on the right.

If you encounter any problems with the new tools, or have any ideas for improvements, email us at editors[at]turbulence.org.uk

More digital Turbulence: MySpace | Twitter | Turbulence on Facebook | E-Newletter

In April 2010, we have a book,

More information can be found here.

Movements become apparent as “movements” at times of acceleration and expansion. In these heady moments they have fuzzy boundaries, no membership lists–everybody is too engaged in what’s coming next, in creating the new, looking to the horizon. But movements get blocked, they slow down, they cease to move, or continue to move without considering their actual effects. When this happens, they can stifle new developments, suppress the emergence of new forms of politics; or fail to see other possible directions. Many movements just stop functioning as movements. They become those strange political groups of yesteryear, arguing about history as worlds pass by. Sometimes all it takes to get moving again is a nudge in a new direction… We think now is a good time to ask the question: What is winning? Or: What would–or could–it mean to “win?”

Contributors include: Valery Alzaga and Rodrigo Nunes, Colectivo Situaciones, Stephen Duncombe, Gustavo Esteva, The Free Association, Euclides André Mance, Michal Osterweil, Kay Summer and Harry Halpin, Ben Trott, and Nick Dyer-Witheford.

Reviews

“Where is the movement today? Where is it going? Are we winning? The authors of the essays in this volume pose these and other momentous questions. There are no easy answers, but the discussion is always insightful and provocative as the writers bravely take on the challenge of charting the directions for the Left at a time of ecological crisis, economic collapse, and political disillusionment.” – Walden Bello, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South

“Turbulence presents an exciting brand of political theorising that is directed and inspired by current strategic questions for activism. This kind of innovative thinking, which emerges from the context of the movements, opens new paths for rebellion and the creation of real social alternatives.” – Michael Hardt, co-author ofCommonwealth, Multitude and Empire.

“The history of the past half-century and particularly the last decade is as easily told as a series of victories as defeats, maybe best as both. Sometimes we won–and this is what makes the What Does It Mean to Win?anthology such a powerful vision of the possible and the seldom-seen present. The authors of this book connect some of the more remarkable events of the last decade–in Oaxaca, in the banlieus of Paris, in the crises of neoliberalism–into a constellation of possibilities and demands, demands on the world but also demands on the readers, to think afresh of what is possible and what it takes to get there. As one author begins, ‘The new movements embodied and posited deliberate reactions to the practical and theoretical failures of previous political approaches on the left.’ This is the book about what came after the failures, and what’s to come” – Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell.

Product Details

Author: Turbulence Collective
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-110-5
Published: April 2010
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 160
Dimensions: 9 by 6
Subjects: Politics, Philosophy, Activism

Available for Pre-Order from: PM Press | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.de | Amazon.at | Amazon.fr | Amazon.co.jp | Borders | Barnes and Nobel | Books-A-Million |

If you would like to comment on, or respond to, any of the articles published by Turbulence, write to us at editors@turbulence.org.uk, stating clearly that what you are sending us is for publication.

The new section can be found here.

The world’s currently most watched film conveys suspicion against “the system”. What does that tell us?

Sverker Lenas in Dagens Nyheter (12/1/2010)

At the same time as the numbers for the Christmas trade are – once again – up to record heights, the number one cinema blockbuster takes issue with the destructiveness of a society that aspires to infinite growth. In “Avatar”, humanity has been forced to colonise and exploit a new planet in order not to perish on the old one. With the help of gigantic “hell trucks”, confusingly similar to those gigantic trucks that transport the Canadian tar sands, they mine the mineral unobtanium – a necessary component of Earth’s energy supply, all the while the planet’s indigenous population is being murdered, and the forest devastated.

Does director James Cameron believe in infinite growth on a finite planet? I’m guessing not. The real question is what it says about the state of world order if the world’s currently most-watched movie – produced in the heart of the global Empire – conveys suspicion against “the system”?

“We are trapped in a state of limbo” writes the international magazine Turbulence (no. 5/2009) in a massive manifesto in their most recent issue. Limbo, this emptiness, refers to the absence of an ideological core at the heart of the system. Although neoliberalism has been in crisis for nearly two years, the neoliberals are still in power. Banks and major companies have been nationalised, not in order to change a useless system, but in order to save it. Everything has changed, so everything can stay the same.

But, Turbulence points out, there has nonetheless been a change insofar as the middle ground of politics has moved. For example, only two years ago it was impossible to articulate a critique of growth without being labelled a loony. Today the 1972 Club of Rome’s report “Limits to Growth” is cited ever more frequently without mockery or ridicule. In Sweden there are today discussions about the economy’s ecological limits on well-known blogs such as Livet efter oljan (Life after oil), Cornucopia or Flute, newspapers such as Effekt magasin, and ever more frequently even in established outlets. The Social Democrats’ student organisation’s programme for the coming decade raises questions about the habit of growth. Even conservative politicians are doing it.

What will come to occupy the middle ground of politics instead of deregulation and privatisation? Climate justice and commoning – the extension of the commons – Turbulence hopes.

More suggestions are likely to follow at the same speed as Hollywood will produce movies predicting the collapse. All the while, the growth society’s container ships will continue on their journey. But is there really anybody standing behind the wheel? Or is it just the law of inertia that keeps the vessel on course?

Sverker Lenas

Sverker.lenas@dn.se

An MP3 of the presentation of the new issue, John Holloway’s response, and the discussion which followed has been made available here.

Websites: Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory | Historical Materialism NYC 2010 Conference | Historical Materialism Toronto 2010 Conference

Danish and Dutch translations of the article are also available. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Hindi, Finnish and Swedish translations are expected soon. Watch this space! (And let us know if you have any ideas about publications who might be interested in carrying these translations.)